@Mimirsan

Problem is not if she likes it. Problem is that happens. As not only their retail things sucks in general (but looks initially very good for customer). Also their cloud services make pressure and making waves of support staff reductions at hosting companies.

The future Amazon has in mind for our country is a far cry from the middle class prosperity President Obama has been seeking.

I don't think I can take any of this research by these people seriously now. It's downright delusional to still believe Obama is "seeking" anything that resembles middle class prosperity. Obamacare is the nail in the coffin on the US middle-class unless it's repealed immediately in 2016. If it wasn't obvious already, they're not trying to do anything bedsides collapse the world's economies' and issue a global currency with the centralized elite-Statism that fallows.

As far as the Amazon stuff goes, well, they're basically a-moral. Their is no hidden "evil agenda", as this information makes it seem. It's absurd to believe that companies and businesses can profit from destruction. This is not how trade works... It's just propaganda again. Business and (most) corporations will lose their wealth as the wealth of the people drop, it's not in their interest to "oppress" people, as much as many people believe it is. Only government and the state actually benefits from taking away wealth and keeping people poor and dependent.

What were actually seeing here is a problem... but not really anyone's fault. Again, it's just natural progress as our technological level moves forward. Amazon's services are better for consumers to acquiring goods. That's it. Brick-and-Morter retail has much higher resource consumption and takes too much unnecessary man-hours that can simply be done by computers (like most jobs now). I don't like that people are losing their jobs... but it's still not in the best interest of society to just "keep" unnecessary labor for the sake of it. Energy for the buildings cost more, maintenance costs more, theft is higher, higher carbon footprint, more pollution, more stress on city infrastructure... ect. If we don't adapt every once in a while, the cost of keeping old labor and inefficient production around will become too high to bear... economically and environmentally.

Survival of the fittest. The brick and mortar man can close down his shop and turn virtual. There are lots of online scams. But there are also many legit businesses that give clients good value for money. A more pertinent question would be, who is responsible for job creation and losses? Is it the govt, or the economy? If investors are pulling out of your country, whose fault is it? And if people are losing their power to consume, whose fault is it?

"Issue is - it is wrong view to think that peoples goal is to cut and optimize everything."

LOLOLOL! That must have been hard to type with a straight face!

@goanna

Such things are happening all around the globe, and not only with bookstores.

This isn't some diabolical conspiracy, Amazon simply offers more value than its competitors and that is why the competitors are fading away. No way in hell am I going to drive to a book store to buy more book clutter, and loiter around in the aisles drinking overpriced coffee so I can feel good about keeping someone employed in a dead end job. I can spend half as much money and a fraction of the time downloading content to sync with all of my mobile devices simultaneously.

I have to agree with Vitaly, here. Cried of survival of the fittest or free markets don't really hold up with Amazon. This idea of operating without a profit until they kill off their competition and own everything strikes me as insidious.

There's nothing inevitable about the way Amazon operates. Government, and only government, makes its peculiar exploitative model possible, and government can take away that power. There's nothing Darwinian about it, except to the extent very rich interests capture government policy.

Those prone to "free market" fantasies might actually want to read Adam Smith some time. He deplores the Amazon type of capitalism.

As for Obamacare killing the middle-class -- the poster might want to ask himself why societies with universal health care like Germany are more competitive than the U.S. today, and why lower and middle income citizens in those societies live far better than they do in the U.S. Those preferring a more "laissez-faire" model can always go to places like Honduras or Nigeria -- low and easily evaded taxes, government interference in your business limited to the occasional bribe, no paying for social and public services, etc. Strangely though, free market devotees never try their luck in those places as permanent residences. They seem to want everything societies like ours offer, but just not to pay for it.

I can't speak for the end of days, but for generations, northern Europeans have enjoyed a comfortable welfare state, while also maintaining national prosperity.

Maybe it's all illusion or is crashing down tomorrow, but hundreds of millions have enjoyed it, from birth to grave, and are still enjoying it. Anyone who took those warnings seriously -- warnings of imminent collapse have been heard for generations -- would have wasted a life.

@vitaliy I think you'll like this study, if you hadn't already seen it already when it came out a couple of years ago. There was some computer modeling done on the biggest corporations in the world and it was determined that 147 Corporations are supersized behemoths, but most of the rest of the world's corporations and individuals were invested in them. And what that this is a common structure in nature, although it's unstable and prone to collapse, because everything is so interconnected. Collapse is pretty much inevitable given where things are now, it would seem. But what comes after that? http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html#.UoFk6I1Jwq5